Address by Giovanni Gronchi to the Constituent Assembly (24 July 1946)
Total Page:16
File Type:pdf, Size:1020Kb
Address by Giovanni Gronchi to the Constituent Assembly (24 July 1946) Caption: On 24 July 1946, addressing the Constituent Assembly, Giovanni Gronchi, MP and Leader of the Christian Democrats in the Italian Parliament, calls for a vote of confidence in the new De Gasperi government. Source: Discorsi parlamentari: Gronchi, Giovanni. Roma: Senato della Repubblica-Segretariato Generale- Servizio Studi, 1986. 601 p. p. 224-240. Copyright: (c) Translation CVCE.EU by UNI.LU All rights of reproduction, of public communication, of adaptation, of distribution or of dissemination via Internet, internal network or any other means are strictly reserved in all countries. Consult the legal notice and the terms and conditions of use regarding this site. URL: http://www.cvce.eu/obj/address_by_giovanni_gronchi_to_the_constituent_assembly _24_july_1946-en-6c92d33a-c20e-4cdf-a3b9-700024d3aeee.html Last updated: 05/07/2016 1/10 Address by Giovanni Gronchi to the Constituent Assembly (24 July 1946) On the communications from the President of the Council of Ministers (confidence in the second De Gasperi Government) (Constituent Assembly, sitting on 24 July 1946) PRESIDENT: The Honourable Mr Gronchi has asked for the floor. GRONCHI: Honourable Members, the discussions on the Government declarations — apart from what has been said by Mr Palmiro Togliatti — have on the whole been on specific points. In other words, they have focused on various aspects of the Government programme, examining their feasibility and nature, and they have added recommendations or suggestions, in general expressing consensus and confidence. Obviously this practical examination of government policy is of some importance. Woe betide those political classes and governments that raise problems without outlining their solutions in the most tangible of terms! In the practical action of every Ministry I should say that there is a need today for a technical approach, for closeness of contact with reality; without this, it is all too common to lapse into the kind of abstractions in which broad political assemblies like to indulge, but it is no longer the time for ideological reactions or revolutions. The very moderation of the more extremist parties’ programmes demonstrates a recognition at this time of the need to keep as firm a hold on reality as possible, the need to choose the most concrete, the most practical, the most practicable solutions to the problems. But can all these government problems be solved purely on the technical level? And can the set of measures that a government lays before the nation determine, purely by its ‘technical’ content, the face and political function of that government at a given moment? What is obviously of greater relevance in steering the country and the Assembly is rather the broader political thinking against which these problems are to be set. Without lapsing into abstractions, then, it may be helpful to say a few brief words about this thinking. This has been our greatest preoccupation. For us, emerging from the electoral campaign with a stronger expression of confidence than was given to any other party, the problem of forming the government was not seen as a concern to jockey for position and acquire influence. It was seen as a need to steer government policy in the direction best suited to the problems and the responsibilities that we have assumed towards the nation. And if we were to express our collective thinking on the manner in which the crisis has been resolved, we should not have cause for excessive satisfaction. We have often been accused, sometimes in acerbic terms, of being somewhat greedy for position and power. But a brief look at the distribution of portfolios in this Government and, rather than their number, the actual relevance of each of these posts to Government policy will show that our friend Alcide De Gasperi has been so moderate as to cause some bewilderment even among ourselves. (Applause from the centre. Comments.) Because it is of little moment, as a political force, to hold the military portfolios when the positions of real influence have been allotted to other political factions, with which we also need and desire to cooperate. (Comments.) The resistance offered at certain points in the crisis, which has rendered the solution more delicate, has related to problems in the nature of planning or questions of principle that have deterred us from taking on the Education Ministry, on a par with any other party, or prevented some of the key factors determining our country’s economic and social life from coming under our direct control. Mr Togliatti, in some of his writings as a journalist rather than in the speech he has made here, has demonstrated a concept of tripartism with which we do not entirely concur. At the time he accused 2/10 Mr De Gasperi of wanting to create not a tripartite government but a government of his own. By this he meant that, to use a commonplace — one that is repeated in the newspapers as well as in this Chamber — the Christian Democrats once again are seeking the lion’s share in this political situation. But here it was not a matter of setting up our own government, it was a question of responding to the country’s expectations and accepting that responsibility in full, naturally having regard for the value to the nation of working with the leading political forces, but also of establishing, as primus inter pares, that it was more than a right, it was above all a duty, to exert the influence of our thinking and determine the path we are to take. (Applause from the centre.) It was above all a duty, and we should be willing to accept the same criterion if a different political situation were to shift the weight of greater responsibilities to other parties in this Chamber. It may perhaps be useful, then, to summarise the approach that we have sought and are seeking to impart to this Government’s general policy, since it is from the set of problems stated in practical terms in the Government declarations that — as I was saying — the general direction in which we intend to steer the country’s policy is to be inferred. First and foremost is a revaluation of the moral factors. This was something we also expressed in laying claim to the Education Ministry. It is not that we intend to create any monopoly or to make education the base for any party politics; our intention is to affirm the importance, in our eyes, of the formation of awareness and the renewal of school education as the factors that should be the cornerstone of our new political life and our new democracy. We feel that this is a problem of either the shaping of awareness, in other words what is called the development of the human personality, whose necessity is universally recognised, or repression and violence. Profound transformations in political and economic systems are brought about by the slow permeation of hearts and minds, creating the conviction in the minds of individuals that those transformations will reflect greater justice and higher interests, objectively interpreted. Otherwise this abolition of privilege, this fairer distribution of wealth, this closer participation of the people in the life of the State, can be obtained only by repression or by the force of law. But if a people does not appreciate the need for and legitimacy of such aspirations, there is no sanction, no law that would suffice to impose radical changes in custom or in the system; it is evident, then, that the appeal we are making for a renewal, for a higher level of awareness, certainly points to the safest, most practical and most enduring path towards the radical renewal we all hope to see. Whence our fervent desire for liberty, a desire that makes some people smile; whence the accent we place on this foundation of democratic life without which — in our opinion — there can be no true and real civilisation. We fear violence, not so much because violence injures the body but rather because it oppresses the soul, because it is an offence to the dignity of the spirit, because it prevents ideas from freely spreading and becoming established in the life of peoples, and from conquering minds with the only force that may legitimately be exercised: the force of ideas that reflect the higher concepts of fraternity, solidarity and justice, the concepts for which after every war, and especially after this war, humanity has an irrepressible yearning. (Applause.) We need liberty, because without liberty there can be no possibility of promoting our ideas. We do not hesitate to repeat that we abhor violence as a matter of principle. Not because this is a sign of moral baseness but because we do not believe in the merits of violence as a constructive force. We believe, on the contrary, in the slow reacquisition and gradual liberation of awareness, towards which we are directing all our work, all our effort, all our understanding. As regards the necessity of justice, we have to say once again — after the accusations of heterogeneity all too often addressed to this part of the Chamber — that in these hasty statements, our position on the economic problem may admittedly be seen as not so far distant from the traditional positions of liberal thinking; our approach, however, which has also been expressed in the specific statements made in the Government declarations, is profoundly different. In our view, the principles of justice must not be governed by technical demands or by the ‘economic’ laws of production, but the latter must be subject to the primacy of the principles of justice. It cannot be that in the phenomena of the collective life of a people we see only the demands of production, in their raw form of an inexorable goal.